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List of tables -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction : intellectual narratives as historical inquires and life reactions -- A genealogy of social theory on intellectuals -- The narrativist turn and the historical construction of intellectual self -- Analysing and defending intellectual narratives -- Readings and struggles : Hermeneutics of suspicion in the social context of intellectual life -- Emplotment, or reaction on history, and intellectual self -- Plots or distinctive personal characters acting for the social margins -- Public writings of local intellectuals : the narrative completion -- Conclusion -- References -- Appendix: A chronology of the emplotment of historical events in intellectual narratives -- Index

This book aims to study the intellectual lives of three Hong Kong intellectuals by narrating their lives as self-reflections on theories related to social margins. Drawing on insights from Paul Ricoeur, Hannah Arendt and Zygmunt Bauman, the author analyses their narratives through in-depth interviews. Their stories point to an interpretative understanding of the works they had cursorily read when creating their historical narrations of Hong Kong from the 1970s to 2003. These stories of individual intellectuals, together with their interpretations of what they have individually read about vario

Canadian children's literature rarely depicts characters labelled with intellectual disabilities, yet when it does it often remains mired in stereotypes that recycle prevalent myths and misconceptions. Even as more recent literature attempts to push back against such stereotypes, it nevertheless predominantly remains caught in these dangerous representational repertoires. This article offers a brief history of Canadian literary depictions of intellectual disability and a critique of the Canadian publishing spheres. Through a critical analysis of Lorna Schultz Nicholson's book Fragile Bones, we discuss the limits of representation of intellectual disability in children's fiction. We also offer a critique of the ableist publishing climate in Canada and suggest that structural barriers prevent disabled writers from entering the literary marketplace on an equal playing field. These barriers to publishing lead to the vast underrepresentation of disabled authors and the misrepresentation of disability in general and intellectual disability in particular in Canadian children's literature.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to provide a narrative review of the literature on substance use/misuse within an intellectual disability (ID) population. The paper is focused on the prevalence, motivation and implications of substance use as well as the interventions for misuse.Design/methodology/approach– Research focused on substance use and ID (IQ of 70 or less with onset in the developmental period) were considered.Findings– The findings indicate a disparity between research findings regarding the prevalence of substance use/misuse within ID populations. Previous research indicates that individuals with ID may use/misuse substances as a form of relief or respite from negative experiences. Although there is a clear need for intervention, many of the ID population do not engage with generic interventions for substance misuse. Additionally, professionals responsible for the provision of interventions identify a lack of training and support to meet the needs of ID populations.Research limitations/implications– Minimal research in this areas, barriers to language and demographics being underreported.Practical implications– Highlights problems with the current evidence base and barriers this poses indicates a need for further research and intervention.Social implications– Implications for the equality for individuals with an ID and their access to appropriate intervention. Focus on prevention of offending behaviour and intervention as appose to management.Originality/value– In order to build a greater understanding of this issue, a shared universal language and definition of ID must be implemented. Further research to improve the understanding of why those with ID misuse substances is imperative before designing and implementing useful interventions.

This article describes an exploratory study that examined the perspectives of practitioners who spend much of their working day listening to and in some ways "interpreting" for people with severe intellectual disabilities. On the basis of focus group interviews with 23 professional disability-sector workers, including speech therapists, psychologists, and human service workers, the article reports on the importance of a practitioner's values and experience in successful interactions with individuals who rely on self-developed nonsymbolic communication repertoires. The article includes a discussion of the likelihood of including individuals with severe intellectual disabilities in narrative research.

The ending of the original The Blob I have a distinct memory of watching the original The Blob on a Saturday afternoon movie. I watched a lot of Saturday afternoon movies, Godzilla, all of the Universal monsters, and various giant ants, crabs, and praying mantis. The Blob stood out because it was actually frightening in a way that a giant monster crushing a city was not, and because its ending, in which a frozen blob was dropped someplace north of the Arctic Circle was followed by a giant question mark hovering over the sky, lingered in my mind. At the time it seemed like the perfect way to end a horror movie, with the horror still intact. I must admit as well that Steve McQueen's last line, "As long as the Arctic stays cold," sounds much more ominous these days.  
It is perhaps because of this fondness for the original that I rewatched the eighties remake as part of the Criterion Channel's 80s Horror collection (parenthetically I want to throw out a few words of praise for the Criterion Channel in general and for their ability to do a great job with Halloween programing. While the collection only has a few horror movies, including, for some reason, the original Blob, the channel has branched out to include some classics, like Wolfen, some forgotten gems, like The Hidden, and some oddballs that would not show up anyplace else). The remake is uneven, but not terrible. Perhaps its best innovation is to update the original film's social conflict. The original was framed in the conflict between the small town authority figures and the kids (who were portrayed by actors well into their twenties when the film was made). This is preserved in the figure of Kevin Dillon, who, for some reason, wears the "Puffy shirt" that Seinfeld would make famous. The remake expands the social conflict to include a government agency whose attempt to contain the blob is couched in cold war paranoia in which every alien is a potential bioweapon. Its real improvement, however, in how it updates the question mark that lingers over the original with a scene featuring the town's preacher. He has witnessed the blob's attack on the small town and concludes that it is a harbinger of the apocalypse, that he sees himself tasked to complete. Upon rewatching I realized that what I liked about this ending is its fundamental incompleteness. There was no sequel to this particular version of the blob. The ending just hovers as a question mark. I wish more films were allowed to end on the question. The original Halloween has one of the best endings of modern horror. Its ending makes the film feel like one of the stories told around a campfire about "escaped lunatics." When I was growing up "escaped lunatic" stories were what we told camping, not ghost stories, and they always ended with some twist about the scratching of a car roof, or who was licking a hand, all guaranteed to make it hard to sleep. Halloween's ending, "he looked over the balcony and the body wasn't there" always seemed to be one such ending, which is why the film almost feels more like a rendition of a kind of urban legend or folk tale. Of course this ending has been turned into multiple sequels that have expanded on Michael Myers ability to survive bullets, fire, stabbings, etc., As I watched the most recent film in the long line of sequels, Halloween Ends I kept thinking that it would be better if the whole series had ended with just the shot of the imprint in the shape of the body in grass (or gone in the direction Carpenter wanted, with a different Halloween film each year, as in the underrated Season of the Witch).. All of the original movies of the eighties and seventies that were serialized into sequels, reboots, and, in the language of the new Scream film, requels (reboot and sequel, like the new Halloween films that simultaneously follow existing films and restart the sequence, often cutting films out of the canon), Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, ended on a question mark, on a scene in which the seemingly dead killer or monster comes back in one last jump scare. In the parlance of the times, they left it open for a sequel, but now, everything is open for a sequel. Any character that does not die can return, and even those who do can return, somehow. The endings of the originals almost function as frightening short films in their own right, albeit, ones dominated by jump scares. It is worth noting how much they "hold up" even as many of the sequels and prequels they gave rise to fade into well deserved obscurity. All of those sequels, which expand upon and then reduce the mythology of the characters, add up to so much less than endings which made them possible. The question mark, incompleteness, is as much a part of the narrative as what we see on the screen. Contemporary intellectual property driven film production, however, abhors a vacuum. Everything that is not explicitly resolved must be made and remade until there is nothing left to extract from it. A lot of the frustration and boredom that many people feel about contemporary film and television stems from the tension between narrative, which demands closure as well as incompleteness, and the extraction of value which works against both. It is not enough to see that a character lives, the sequel must be made, just like it is not enough to learn that spies found the plans for the Death Star, we must see their story, and their back story. Narratives are finite by definition, but commodity production is a bad infinity. 

AbstractBetween 1991 and 2001, Qian Xuesen, China's leading missile expert, was given an array of honourable titles by the state, followed by eulogistic narratives by the media and his biographers. This article analyses three forms of Chinese narratives about Qian: commendations from the state, stories told by his biographers, and Qian's self-presentation. It aims to show that although the CCP showered Qian with compliments seemingly because of his contributions to China's national defence and space programmes, the real reasons were Qian's political fidelity and the Party's aim to build a role model for intellectuals to emulate. The article demonstrates that Maoist practices of "hero construction" and using history for the present persist in the post-Mao period with some variations, and that the writings of "unofficial history" are heavily influenced by official history.